I consider myself lucky to have been able to focus on the skills that I needed or were required of me at any given time. My livelihood was dependent on my dev

I consider myself lucky to have been able to focus on the skills that I needed or were required of me at any given time. My livelihood was dependent on my dev skills more than 5 years after I learned to code (first IRC scripts, then HTML, css, then JS, then python, and more recently ansible, docker, etc). Since I either needed or had to pick up some new tech, I was always open to learning more without thinking too much about it ("is it a good career move", "is this for me", etc), just focusing on getting it done ("I want a website, how do I do that", "my website needs a database, how does that work", "we got hacked, how do I move everything to a new server and secure it better"). The decisions I took were mostly around what tech do I use or don't use (ie my stack), rather than what area (front, backend, devops etc). In other words, the area was dictated by the context /needs at the time, and the stack on my personal choices (django/python vs ruby/rails, ansible vs salt, react vs angular, etc etc). This works for me, and my clients/employers, since I just get things done. It also means I may be missing on opportunities to learn stuff about things that I don't need now but may be good to know, like cryptocurrencies, machine learning, decentralised apps, and the like - although I'm interested in those areas I don't have the time to learn more about them. (but when/if I need to learn about them, I know/hope I will, just like I did before). Hope this helps.